


Flowers of the Ivy

by regshoe



Category: Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Genre: F/F, Nature, Post-Canon, Seasonal Spirits and Guardians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:19:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27137189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regshoe/pseuds/regshoe
Summary: Settling into her life as a witch at Great Mop, Laura makes an unexpected new acquaintance.
Relationships: Laura Willowes/Original Female Character
Comments: 8
Kudos: 6
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	Flowers of the Ivy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phantomlistener](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantomlistener/gifts).



> This was a fantastic prompt—I very much enjoyed writing it, and I hope you enjoy the result!
> 
> This story begins the next day after the end of the book, with Laura on her way back to Great Mop.
> 
> Many thanks to Luzula for excellent beta reading.

Laura walked the remaining eight miles back to Great Mop the next morning, not hurrying. It was a cooler day than the previous one had been, and the hills and woods of her freedom were mellow in the soft, but keen, light of early autumn: the yellowing leaves of the birches and aspens down in the valleys, the Michaelmas daisies beneath the hedgerows, the globes of tiny green ivy flowers, all were fresh and bright in the mild air. Laura, breakfasting upon blackberries, thought that the sunlight seemed to show these things anew, as if they had cast off the dusty Apsley Terrace air which Titus had brought with him and, free once again, gloried in the fading autumn light. She was very glad.

For the most part there was no one else about; but a mile or so from Great Mop, returning along a footpath by the edge of a beech wood, she saw a woman standing motionless beneath the trees. She looked up at Laura's approach.

'Good morning, Miss Willowes,' she said.

Laura did not believe she knew her; the woman's face was not familiar from amongst those she saw along the street of Great Mop. She was tall, with a strong figure and hair a coppery brown in colour, like a prefigurement of the colour which the beech leaves would take on in a few weeks' time—though, somehow, it reminded Laura especially of the spray of autumn beech leaves which she had bought in the shop in the Moscow Road. She was dressed in slightly shabby grey tweeds, unremarkable country clothes, but there was something, difficult to define, about her manner and air which was not at all unremarkable. She smiled in reply to Laura's 'Good morning.'

It occurred to Laura that perhaps this woman was another witch living nearby; she could hardly have remembered the faces of everyone she had seen at the Sabbath, after all, it had been so dark. It seemed quite likely that she was.

But it did not much matter. Laura walked on. Behind her, the strange woman turned from the beech trees and gazed after her.

*

A few days later, Laura walked up one of the low hills to the south of the village to look at a hedgerow which grew there. It was an old hedgerow—perhaps, she thought, it had been planted by the Romans, or by the ancient Britons who had defended these hills against them—and it was untidy and varied in composition in the way that very old hedges often are. The white wispy seedheads of traveller's joy sprawled over the leaves of hazel and maple; the spindly scarlet nightshade berries, deceptive in their glossy beauty, hung from trailing stems; and, where the hedgerow made a gap to admit a wooden gate, there stood a great hawthorn—a tree rather than a bush, standing out from the hedge. Where other trees are golden or brown in autumn, hawthorn turns a deep blood-red with its berries, which clustered so numerously as to have obscured the leaves. Laura thought how she might pick them to make a jelly, or a tincture for the heart, or perhaps a concoction to tempt out the ghosts and fairies who hid behind the thorny branches—for a witch could do any of these things, as she pleased.

While she was enjoying these thoughts, the strange woman from the beech wood walked through the gate and closed it behind her. She greeted Laura and followed her admiring gaze to the hawthorn tree.

'One must wait till after the first frost to pick haws,' remarked Laura. 'The berries must be sharpened by the ice before they are good to eat.'

The woman nodded. 'And that will not be long now,' she said, smiling. She reached up to run her hand through the drooping twigs, fearless of the thorns they bore, slender fingers passing across the deep red berries—such small, fragile things, to withstand the cruel grip of the frost and take greater strength from it. Her face wore an expression which might have been pride.

'I have seen ten thousand autumns pass over these hills,' she said, in a musing tone. This seemed quite likely to Laura; she belonged here in this field, regarding this hedgerow, and might easily have done the same things so long ago as she said. 'No two are alike. These berries, for instance—or those ivy flowers, on the other side of the gate—they have never grown in quite the same pattern as before.'

'Like constellations,' said Laura.

'Yes,' said the woman, turning to look at Laura with a bright smile in her deep brown eyes. 'The flowers of the ivy especially—they are just like little stars to look at—and just as enduring.'

*

Autumn is as busy a time for a witch as it is for most people in the country, and for the next few weeks Laura had much to keep her occupied—walking in her favourite woods and fields and observing the changes in them with the fond eyes of familiarity, collecting nuts and berries and fruit, making jams, preserves and various brews from her harvest. The last swallows of the year flew restlessly about over the rooftops of Great Mop while she worked, for they too had their great work to be embarked upon. She revived some of the old recipes which she remembered from her country childhood and its first dim yearnings after the life of witchcraft, and found that Mrs Leak, who was just as busy with her own autumn activities, could be a valuable help to her when she wanted it. She was helped also by Vinegar, who, lapping milk up from a saucer or playing with a stray piece of twine in the corner of the room, seemed somehow to have a good effect on her work: the jam would set perfectly when he was there, and its flavour become richer. But this was not surprising, she reflected, for of course a good witch's familiar would assist in her work in this way. She did not often stop to reflect on the satisfaction and happiness she found in her new life, but she felt them deeply all the time.

And all the time it seemed to her that there was a presence with her which had not been there before. It was not like the presence of Satan, watching over his captive souls in caring indifference, to whose occasional glance Laura had become accustomed. This was warmer—more personal and, somehow, more human. Such vague, half-understood feelings as this were familiar to her, and so she did not trouble herself with trying to find out its secret before it would be found out, but accepted it as something that would give her its meaning in time. But she was not ignorant, and did wonder.

One sharp, bright morning towards the end of October, when her breath hung in clouds in the air before her, she went out into Mrs Leak's garden and saw the flowers of the ivy, tumbling in a profusion which recalled the riches of high summer over the garden wall. Looking at the clusters of tiny green stars, Laura thought that the meaning of it might be somewhere in amongst them.

*

The next time Laura met the woman—whose name, by the by, she still did not know—she was in a wood. The night before there had been a tremendous storm, and after lunch Laura walked up the hill and through the fields to see what change it had made. At the edge of the wood her steps crackled upon twigs stripped away from their branches, and on the hard prickly cases of the beechmast; here and there, on a particularly exposed side of the trees, a larger branch had come down, and wet brown leaves covered all the debris. Farther in, sheltered by their sacrificed companions, the trees were less altered, though even they seemed more advanced in autumn colour, as though the storm had shocked them into changing. Standing beneath them, at the centre of the wood, there she was.

Her plain grey clothes might have been a beech trunk, and her hair the crown of copper-coloured leaves. But the resemblance, of course, was temporary; as Laura walked towards her a few more leaves fell from the canopy above them, swirling away as if impatient for the winter.

She smiled at Laura, a look both knowing and welcoming, and Laura knew at once who she was—a natural realisation, and probably inevitable upon coming across her in such well-fitting surroundings. She was the Autumn. She was in the storm that brought those twigs and leaves down from the beeches; she was in that unsettled desire in the hearts of the swallows, that made them strike out recklessly on their long way southwards; she was in the flowers of the ivy, writing the patterns they made upon the ancient hedgerows.

Now she beckoned to Laura, her brown eyes shining. 'Come and see the sky through the branches,' she said, indicating where a little chink of pale blue was just visible.

Laura looked, squinting up at the light. 'I wonder,' she said after a while, 'that you can stop here so long and notice such things. I often sit in a wood or a field for an afternoon or so—but a witch can do such things. You have so many other things to think of—the geese, for instance, which were flying over the village when I set off up here.'

There was a pause; a little breeze, perhaps the ghost of last night's storm, crept through the canopy. Then Autumn, who was no longer looking at the sky, said, 'Oh, I should not wonder. We are not so very different, you and I. Of course I think of the geese—those flying over Great Mop just now, and their kin still up on the tundra in Iceland, and the flocks out on the marshes in the east. I am the spirit of Autumn everywhere, after all... but I believe this is my favourite place to see it.'

The Devil, of course, did not have favourites. Certainly she seemed a rather more human spirit.

'This is what you do, then?' asked Laura, gesturing vaguely at the scene around them. 'You see that the geese fly south, and the storms blow away the leaves, and—more things than I can think of, I suppose.' She was interested; her new acquaintance was a revelation of that depth of the world which Laura was only beginning to understand, of the new scenes and images which her witchcraft had opened up to her, things hidden by the mundane cloak under which she had been muffled for so much of her earlier life. She very greatly wanted to understand more—and perhaps there was another reason, also.

Autumn regarded her with her head on one side, and with a look which was half flattered amusement at Laura's keenness and half something less simply summed up. At last she said, 'I will show you what it is I do.'

She took Laura's hand and led her to a little clearing between the trees. As is generally the way with beech woods, the deep shade had prevented the growth of that variety of little plants which cover the ground beneath oak or ash, and so the floor was smooth and level, carpeted in wet leaves, with nothing to impede the steps of their dance.

It was quite unlike the dances at the Sabbath, with their mysterious flickering of ordered confusion. As Laura and the woman who was the spirit of Autumn moved together between the beech trunks, the direction and placing of their steps were entirely certain, inevitable as the shortening days and the growing cold—occasional surprising turns, like a sudden warm wind in November, would only briefly interrupt the pattern, and other turns and changes in the motion were more gentle and more sure, like the thaw after an autumn frost.

Autumn's arm was round Laura's waist, guiding the steps which seemed natural enough to her. Her body was warm against her; she was flesh and blood, and Laura felt sharply the closeness of it, and smelt the earthy scent of her hair—had she expected that it would not be so, because of what she was? ...If so, she had been wrong.

Their steps were slow at first, and then faster; they whirled closer together as did the falling leaves above them. In Laura's mind the storm was acted out again, and she felt the high wind come rushing in over the hills while she and the other inhabitants of Great Mop slept warm and quiet in their beds; she saw the clouds gathering out of the dusky sky, and the rain falling from them; she heard the roaring of the wind in the trees whose joyful greeting of it was too powerful for their own slender twigs. She was aware, also, of the little birds hunkered down deep in the hedgerows, watching the storm, their feathers fluffed up against the cold wind—for Autumn does not neglect such things in the great dramas of her season.

At last the wind died down, the trees stilled, the pale light of the afternoon returned to the wood; and the dance ended. Autumn, more alive than ever, was holding both of Laura's hands in her own. She leaned closer, inviting; and Laura, who still felt the exhilaration of the storm, and of the knowledge which the hills and trees and the wind had, through Autumn, seen fit to show to her—for surely it was a mark of their trust—took the invitation, and kissed her.

It was an action in which she might have surprised herself—such things were quite the contrast from Aunt Lolly, after all—but she was not thinking of that. All was as it should be. And, as the beautiful woman with the copper-brown hair, who was also the ancient spirit of Autumn itself—the two things were not a contradiction—replaced her arm round Laura and pulled her in closer, she felt a warmth which was a long way indeed from the sharp frosts of winter.

*

'Can any woman ever say just why she loves where she does? ...But I believe you saw me long ago. You understood the autumn.'

It was the second week of November, and they were walking together along one of the narrow paths that threaded between the hills and hedgerows. A light rain was falling from a pale grey sky, forming beads at the edges of the ragged leaves. Laura, who did not notice the rain, had just asked what was a very natural question: why, of all people, the Spirit of Autumn had taken such an interest in her?

Now she nodded, for it was true: she had understood the autumn. The season had held a significance for her, ever since the old days of going about the countryside round Lady Place. In London its influence had always been strong. She had thought once that it was Satan's voice alone which she had heard in the goods-yard at Paddington; now she was not so sure, for there were other voices in the world, for those who sought to listen.

'As for you,' she said—for this line of thought had suggested another, even more interesting to her, and she cast around for words in which to express it—'I suppose that the seasons have always been alive, in a way. Other things, too—the trees, and the hills, and the stones.' 

Autumn nodded. 'Yes,' she said, 'there are others. I expect you shall meet them, sooner or later; you're perceptive in that way, and we are strong in this country.'

'Well, having met the Devil,' said Laura, 'and having oneself become a witch, it doesn't seem so improbable that such things should exist, after all. And then, when I think of what women gain through witchcraft—women like myself, and many others—it seems perfectly natural that women should also become spirits of nature in that way. Perhaps I ought to have expected to find you here,' she added, reflectively.

Autumn, who had one arm linked through Laura's, reached out her other hand to pull a withered leaf from an oak which drooped its twigs down above their heads, bringing down a little shower of raindrops as she did so. 'Ah, but the best things in life are always unexpected, isn't it so?' she said, smiling sideways at Laura.

Laura did not fail to respond to this look; but she said, 'Unexpected? Yes, perhaps... I believe,' she went on, after a while, 'that you were in that shop in the Moscow Road. I thought when I first saw you that your hair was just the colour of those particular beech leaves.'

A light blush rose to Autumn's face, as it might do to the face of any woman complimented upon her beauty by one whom she loved. 'But they came from the Chilterns, didn't they?' she said. 'I was here, love. And you found it out, in the end—what you had been seeking for.'

And Laura said, 'Yes. Yes, I did.'

*

And then, one day towards the end of November, it was autumn no longer.

Laura looked out from her parlour window—it was some time after breakfast, for the mornings were very dark now—and saw the great elms standing with their branches bare against the white sky. Closer by, the grey-green fronds of lichen were all that was left to adorn the twigs of the oak tree at the end of Mrs Leak's garden. She knew then that Autumn, that bright presence in the woods, her lover of the beech leaves and the ivy flowers, must soon depart. Without her the woods would sleep quietly, unresponsive to the snow which fell upon them and the storms which, unlike those of autumn, awoke no answering thrill in them. The world would be quiet and cold—until the cowslip meadows bloomed again in April...

All this Laura understood; so the next time she met Autumn there was no need for explanations. Instead she took her hand in silence, and they went together up the hill for a last look at the beech wood—very grey and still now. A flock of fieldfares flew over, their harsh chacking calls loud in the cold air.

There was grief in her going; Laura felt as any lover must do at such a parting. But she was not quite a typical lover—she had never really been typically anything—and it occurred to her now that, passionate as their time together had been, she never could have become entirely wrapped up in another person, could not have shared her whole life, in the way that grand romance tends to assume is everyone's ideal. She valued her own thoughts, her independence and the freedom of the woods and hills too highly for that. So she would remain, a solitary witch happy in herself, for the rest of the year; and when autumn came round again, she would once again have another happiness. They were indeed well-suited to each other.

As for Autumn herself, her expression, as she looked at the fieldfares, the bare trees and the cold sky, was rather one of satisfaction at work carried out well. Her task was done, as it was done every year, and so she must go.

'Here,' she said now. She had paused beside a hedgerow which grew along the bank of a clear stream. 'This alone will stay alive through the winter; it will remember me.' And she gestured towards the ivy which climbed all along the hedge.

Laura smiled. She thought of the ivy putting forth bitter black berries in the dead of winter, bringing food for the fieldfares and hope to the people who cut pieces to take into their homes and make garlands and wreaths. In due course it would grow new leaves, bright and fresh green... and, eventually, it would flower again.

At last Laura spoke. 'Not alone,' she said. More than that, it was not necessary to say.

'No,' said Autumn slowly. She plucked a spray of ivy and placed it in Laura's hand. 'There... I shall hope to see them both again.'

For the turning of the seasons is always a hope and a promise, as well as a loss; a witch is especially well-placed to understand this. Laura, as she returned alone to Great Mop, the strand of ivy wound round her fingers, knew it well.

**Author's Note:**

>  _...it was untidy and varied in composition in the way that very old hedges often are._ —According to Oliver Rackham in 'The History of the Countryside', the age of hedgerows in lowland England can be estimated from the species composition: the number of different tree and shrub species in a thirty-yard stretch is approximately equal to the hedge's age in centuries.


End file.
